Category Archives: Uncategorized

From the “First Superstring Revolution” on, there have always been skeptics, even though they often were not very vocal. Perhaps the most well-known piece of such criticism was Paul Ginsparg and Sheldon Glashow’s Desperately Seeking Superstrings, which appeared in the … Continue reading →

The main argument generally given for working on string theory is that it’s the only way to get a finite theory of quantum gravity. One often hears claims that gravity can’t be quantized using QFT, that string theory is needed … Continue reading →

Seed has a new article out by Stephen Ornes, called The Proof is in the Blogging, about the way the story of Penny Smith’s solution to the Navier-Stokes problem played out here. I’m quite fond of the photo included in … Continue reading →

This week’s Science News has a quite good article about the string theory controversy by Peter Weiss, unfortunately available on-line only to subscribers. The title is “Fit to be Tied: Impatience with string theory boils over”. There’s nothing much in … Continue reading →

Earlier this month there was a workshop on twisted K-theory held at Oberwolfach. Here is a report, also slides from a talk there by Greg Landweber about the Freed-Hopkins-Teleman theorem. Freed is giving a course on the subject this fall, … Continue reading →

The last few weeks have seen the appearance of two papers giving very different proofs of a quite important result in algebraic geometry, resolving a question that had been open for a very long time, and in the process helping … Continue reading →

Yesterday at the KITP Michael Dine gave a very good survey talk on Prospects for a String Theory Phenomenology. It’s pretty much hype free, has a much more realistic point of view than most talks on string phenomenology that I’ve … Continue reading →

The Ottawa Citizen today has an Op-Ed by string cosmologist Jim Cline, headlined The Big Idea That Won’t Die, with a subtitle “The fact that string theory is suddenly under attack only underscores its success as a path to a … Continue reading →

This evening a very interesting paper appeared on the arXiv, entitled Instantons Beyond Topological Theory I by E. Frenkel, Losev and Nekrasov. The authors are studying theories with a topological sector (supersymmetric quantum mechanics and 2d sigma models on a … Continue reading →